Chris Riley - cgriley.com

Finally, after many, many weeks our wall has been rebuilt! And I didn't have to do it, but I did have to pay for it. Damn.

But it is built! Hurray! And here is a pic..

I'm getting used to using Picasa now, and have to say I'm liking it! What I'm starting to use more and more are the simple tuning options and effects you can apply to pictures, far simpler to use than in Photoshop (although horses for courses etc Photoshop is a professional piece of kit). Anyway I took this picture of some frogspawn in my Mum and Dad's pond, and using Picasa you can see how I've improved the pic so you can actually see it! Marvelous!

Can't see it?...


...now you can!

Continuing our Easter weekend maneuvers we've been to my sisters to see them and the cats! The meal was lovely and the cats (Lenny pictured below) kept us entertained!

We've been for another walk along Rivelin Valley today, and so with my new camera I've taken some better quality shots than the last time we were there, like the one below! Click it to see the rest of the pics in the gallery.

As promised in our schedule we went to see "The Games" at Ponds Forge - however this is the only decent picture I took! Oh well, it was a great night out!!

In the land that time forgot, what is the time?

Discuss.

Well the Easter weekend seems to be shaping up quite nicely now! Good Friday evening shall be spent at Ponds Forge in Sheffield after a couple of tickets to watch Channel 4's "The Games" were made available to us by Tony and Suzy (thanks). Swimming and diving are on the agenda and as it's the first show hopefully it will be a good one, we might even be on TV so the video will be set!!

Saturday the parents are coming over for a bite to eat and then a walk down Rivelin Valley, Dad's particularly interested in all the old mill activity along the river, the sluices, dams and water wheel channels etc, so should keep him happy!

Sunday we're going to my sisters for the traditional Easter dinner (I think the traditional one anyway, might be a Mexican for all I know)! Will be nice to catch up with them and see how the various cats are getting on.

The rest of the week I have off work, but Dawn has to work!! Unfortunately that means I still have to get up and drop her off at the station every morning, but I don't mind really! It looks like I'm going to end up rebuilding the wall out the front of our house during my week off due to the economy drive sparked by the price tag of our wedding rings, and my laziness in getting a builder to give us a quote for the wall! However I've decided not to rebuild the whole thing, rather just try and knit the new bit into the other half, hopefully then making the other half a bit more stable! I'll try and take pictures as I do it, if I do do it, so you too can judge my brickie skills!! Other than that the car's going to get serviced (not good for the economy drive) and I'll be doing other odd jobs around the house and garden. And of course relaxing, enjoying the week off work!!

Well, I threatened it a while back that I would switch search engines if Google and Yahoo didn't reindex my site - and still they haven't, well Google hasn't!!!

So now on the right hand side rather than Google's search box, you'll now find MSN's. It's setup to search this site automatically but unlike Google's there is no option to do a normal search. However once you are on MSN search you can do it there!

MSN seem to index my site almost as regularly as I post, so is very handy as a search tool for finding my old posts (like the one above) compared to the shit results that Google returns, and the still mixed results Yahoo return. As an example the below three links show the results of all three sites searching my site for the keyword snowboarding, something littered throughout my posts. I think you'll agree the results are conclusive between MSN and Google, and Yahoo is trying but still includes some old content in there!

• MSN Search
• Google
• Yahoo

And as a further protest I have only linked MSN back to its site, and not Google and Yahoo. They don't deserve the link backs and high ranking (ahem!) I give them.

So the Picasa / Hello / Blogger partnership isn't working today so I'm doing this picture post the hard way, grrr.



Anyway it struck me since the car is looking rather nice after its recent wash it would be an ideal time to take a couple of pics so show those who haven't seen it yet what our new car looks like. As you can see it is a lot bigger than the 106, as is the engine! For those who can't make out the 2 letters above the side indicator, they say V6 - need I say anymore? :o)

Warning, this post is not funny, but just our way of showing the world how house proud we are!

Well, we've done loads today and we are both absolutely shattered!! In no particular order we have:

• Been to Halfords to get the pads that stick rear view mirrors to windscreens (after mine snapped off!)
• Been to Hobbycraft to get some wedding stuff.
• Been to Green + Benz to buy our wedding rings!! (If I can find pictures online I'll post them here). Needless to say we went over budget but they are really really good!!
• Washed the car.
• Fitted the new rear view mirror to the car with the pads bought earlier.
• Cleaned the entire house (except kitchen).
• Hoovered the entire house.
• Done 2 loads of washing.
• Ironed a mountain of clothes.
• Broken up the desk we no longer want.
• Gathered a load of rubbish ready to take to the tip.
• Sorted out a load of paperwork that has been scattered around the house.
• Tackled a mountain of washing up.

I think that's about it, as you can see we've not stopped! Tomorrow we plan to take a little easier, taking a trip to the tip and cleaning the kitchen

So at last my good friend Anthony Main has joined the blogging community, all be it with his usual whinging and whining!!

For an internet developer it is quite hard to believe he's not heard of blogging or web logs, and Ant for your reference the B in blog comes from the end of the word weB!!! If you want to know what that refers to, head over to his blog here.

Judging from his first 3 posts I can see his initiation into the blogging world is going to be a drawn out process......

I said I'd play around with some pictures and here you go. This is me converted to an IPod advert (my uncle has a similar pet project but with street musicians in London.) Not a bad first attempt I think. Just need to add in the white earphones now! I might try some other things like this too - maybe a mountain range IPoded?

Someone at work has bought Earl Grey tea bags instead of standard tea bags and I was made a cup of this muck they call tea today.

It is truly awful, at first it smelt of a burning wood fire, but that quickly gave way to an overwhelming smell of hospital disinfectant. How anyone can drink this muck and enjoy it is beyond me! You have all been warned....

So we are back, and a fun time was had by all, and no injuries! The journey down was a bit of a nightmare, sleeping in the car at a French service station, but it was worth the uncomfortable night for the fresh snow, mountain air and amazing views!

You can check out pictures of our adventures here. We also took a few movies with the camera, although they are huge, so only watch them if you are patient and really want to see some dodgy camera work! They are in no particular order:

• Me snowboarding down a hill (15.4MB)
• Dawn snowboarding down a hill (16.0MB)
• Fiona (Dawn's mum) skiing down a hill (3.7MB)
• Ross falling over ice skating (near the end) (17.2MB)

More stories might follow, and I might play with some of the pictures I took to see if I can improve them a bit - if I do I'll post the results here!

And what do real shops mean?

Yes of course, that for £34 extra you can have your wonderful digital camera straight away, in your hands, ready to take on holiday with you!!

Marvelous things shops!!

At last, the Tesco visa card has arrived, which meant we went racing down to Decathlon in Sheffield to pick up the Cross Trainer we had reserved!

The down side is it's too late for me to get my digital camera before we go away. Bugger.

Oh well, will get it when I get back!!